McKenzie’s shock was replaced with an anger sufficient for Ethan to step forward in front of Amber and pin McKenzie’s wrist down to prevent him from using the wrench.
‘We know you were all paid off,’ Ethan said.
‘And we know that you’re not going to talk and risk losing everything you’ve gained here,’ Lopez added. ‘But not everybody was as lucky as you, and we need to know what the hell happened in Clearwater.’
Ethan released McKenzie’s wrist and the old man pulled himself off the Ranger’s hood and glared at them.
‘I got nothing to say to you folks. I don’t know any Clearwater.’
Amber seemed to get control of her anger as she hissed at McKenzie.
‘Paid you a lot of money, didn’t they,’ Amber said as she gestured to the house and the new truck. ‘I expect you’re looking forward to a nice future without the need to work. But my father has disappeared, and he was going to be worth a thousand times what you’ve been paid to keep your rotting mouth shut. You really think that Stan would have abandoned his friends, not brought them along with him? He shared that device with all of you, took away your energy bills, and this is how you repay him?’
McKenzie’s face fell in shame but he clung to his fortune and future as tightly as he did the wrench in his hand.
‘We didn’t have no choice,’ he uttered. ‘It was accept the terms or walk with nothing. What would you expect us all to have done? Stanley took off, fled before the troops arrived. They sat me down, offered me more money than I could have earned in ten lifetimes to just up sticks somewhere else and say nothing to anybody about it.’
‘Who?’ Ethan asked. ‘Who offered you money?’
McKenzie beckoned them in closer, looking about him as though suddenly nervous that they were being listened to.
‘I don’t know who they were and frankly I don’t give a damn. They were good to their word and I’ve never seen them again since.’
‘Tell us,’ Lopez insisted. ‘We not going to go to these people and tell them that Mac McKenzie ratted them out. We’re already on their trail, you’ll just be saving us some time and I have a feeling that they’re not likely to take away what they’ve given you for fear of you shouting about it. Tell us what you know, and we’ll be on our way.’
McKenzie peered at them certainly. ‘Who are you folks?’
‘Truthfully?’ Ethan said. ‘We’re working for the Defense Intelligence Agency and we know what happened at Clearwater stinks. We know that the entire town was paid off to remain silent, and that the money offered was a powerful incentive to do so. We’re not here to take it from you, just to find out what happened.’
‘It’s important, Mac,’ Amber insisted. ‘What my father did may now cost him his life, and if somebody doesn’t help us then we can’t help him. Just tell us what happened.’
McKenzie sighed and tossed his wrench down alongside the Ford as he rubbed his temples with his fingers, leaving greasy smears across his forehead.
‘Old Stan called a meeting down in the town hall, one night during the week. The councillors were there too and a couple of the bosses of the local logging firms. Stan told them that he wanted to wire up the town’s electricity supply to something he had designed. He said that if it didn’t work out, then they would simply rewire to the National Grid and carry on as normal. But he said that if it did work, we’d never pay another energy bill as long as we lived.’ McKenzie chuckled. ‘That got everybody’s attention. We figured we had nothing to lose, so we went ahead and let ‘im do it.’
‘What happened after that?’ Lopez asked.
‘Stan was as good as his word. The power supply went off while he wired up this device of his, and then suddenly the power was back on and that was that. Nothing changed, except the fact that our electricity bills stopped coming in, because all the bills read zero.’
‘Didn’t the local electricity companies come in and ask what was going on?’ Ethan asked. ‘Surely they must have had a stake in it all?’
‘They showed up a couple of days later,’ McKenzie said. ‘We all just said the same thing, that we were on oil burners now and we didn’t need an external electricity supply. That’s what Stan told us to say, that we were to say nothing about the device he had installed. Those electricity company guys weren’t impressed and they didn’t like it, but using oil burners is quite common in these parts and there’s really nothing they could do about it. We didn’t hear anything from them after that.’
‘Somebody must have noticed though,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘How long was it before the troops showed up?’
McKenzie leaned against the Ford and folded his arms as he frowned thoughtfully.
‘About a week. Things were going great and everyone was really excited about getting energy for free. Many of the houses that had previously been on oil burners took advantage of Stan’s device and were delighted at the savings they were making. Everybody was really amped I guess, about what might happen in the future. Stan was adamant that we must keep quiet about it, that there’d be those who’d attempt to stop him from developing the device further, especially the oil and gas companies. But the town’s council were keen to publicise what had happened, because they knew it would stop that local company from mining the mountaintops outside of Clearwater.’ McKenzie looked at Ethan. ‘Stan was against that, of course. He said we should wait, get things more sorted before we started advertising what had happened.’
‘Did the council listen to him?’ Ethan asked.
‘Yeah, they listened,’ McKenzie said. ‘They knew how Seavers Incorporated had used dirty tactics in the past to gain mining rights in other towns in other states, so they knew they had to play their hand right. All of the councillors were on board and agreed to say nothing about the device.’ McKenzie sighed again. ‘That’s the damnedest thing about it. Stanley insisted that when the time came, the device schematics, the plans for making these things were to be distributed by mail and by Internet across the globe as fast as possible. He had this crazy plan of printing thousands and thousands of copies of the blueprints and just mailing them to all corners of the country, so that people could build these things for themselves rather than buy them from Stan.’
Ethan looked at Lopez and she shook her head in amazement.
‘I’ll be damned, he really was planning to give it all away for nothing,’ she said.
‘Just like I told you,’ Amber replied. ‘My father wasn’t going to make a fortune from this, he was going to give it away to humanity for the better of us all.’
McKenzie nodded, clearly ashamed at his own selling out in the face of Stanley Meyer’s extraordinary altruism.
‘Stan was apparently about to get ready to distribute his plans when suddenly he and his wife just took off as fast as they could in the middle of the night. Only reason I knew they’d gone was because I was on my way home from the local bar and saw their car leave, the trunk packed full of suitcases. I was pretty much drunk at the time, but in the morning I figured that they decided to get themselves out of sight before the storm broke just in case Stan was right and somebody was out to get them.’
‘And you never saw them again?’ Ethan pressed.
‘Nope,’ McKenzie replied. ‘That was the last I ever saw of Stan and Mary, and the soldiers showed up less than two days later.’
‘Tell us about them,’ Amber insisted. ‘Anything you can remember.’
‘That is pretty much everything,’ McKenzie admitted with a frown. ‘It’s not every day your town gets shut off by the military, and men in sharp suits offer you twenty million bucks to say nothin’.’